Hello VTMoz,
To answer your question, "it depends". Have you read this post yet?
https://moz.com/blog/content-audit
Look at this section:
https://moz.com/blog/content-audit#13
If it has traffic from external sources (e.g. referral traffic, organic search traffic) you will want to treat it differently than if it didn't have any traffic. Likewise, if it has external links, you'll obviously want to make sure you redirect the URL.
To Martijn's point, just make sure you do your research here (i.e. content audit) before pruning content from your site. It can be easy to make a mistake and do more harm than good if you're not careful. For example, I've seen situations where an entire section was removed from the site because it didn't have any traffic, but many of those pages had links so when they were removed the site's rankings, as a whole, suffered.
But if you have a bunch of outdated, unlinked, low quality content pages, this could be just what you need to revitalize your site and consolidate ranking factors, such as external and internal links, into fewer pages for more benefit.